


Two Rings

by bagog



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, Future Fic, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Series, Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 22:06:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4238250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bagog/pseuds/bagog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's years into Kaidan and Shepard's marriage, and they're preparing to attend a special ceremony. Otherwise, this would be their morning routine this many years on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Rings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mareel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mareel/gifts).



> Okay! Moving slow on these, but this fic continues my series of gift-fics for people who have left me really really wonderful comments that have inspired me and kept me going!
> 
> This on is for Mareel! We share a lot of the same head canons, and that's fantastic! I always appreciate your comments so much and it really means so much when you articulate what worked for you! Honored that you're reading, and I hope you like this little fic.
> 
> This is fluffy even by my standards: a virtually plotless little glimpse into the life of a many-years-married Kaidan and Shepard.

Shepard used his towel to clear the fog from the mirror in a single streak, then wrapped it around his waist. The shower had warmed up his muscles, but his joints still ached as he raised his arms up above his head, feeling one of his reconstructed ribs pop. Last, he took each fist in an open palm and cracked his knuckles, really leveraging on the rings on his left hand to get a good sound.

Today, though, the rings caught his attention: the Victory ring he’d worn all these years around his left index, and the simple silver wedding band. He wiped some suds clinging to the wedding band away with his thumb, tracing along the whole edge, drying it against his towel.

Satisfied, he brushed his hair up off his forehead into a silver shock. Then he worked his shaving soap up to a lather and pasted it over his face, hating the scratching feeling of the brush against the bristly white hairs on his cheek. Scraping a clean swath down the only part of his face unmarked by scars, he sighed and turned his attention to his wedding band again.

He tried to turn the ring with his thumb, but it wouldn’t budge. Clenching the razor between his teeth, he easily slipped the Victory Ring of his finger with a little jimmying and set it carefully next to the sink.

But pulling at the wedding band did nothing. Shepard frowned.

“Kaidan?” he called—nothing but consonants—then took the razor out from between his teeth, opened the bathroom door, “Kay? Should we take off our rings for the thing this afternoon?”

“Umm,” there came a strained reply from the bedroom, “I don’t know? It is regulation… ooph.”

“We’re guests of honor, though.” Shepard ran the blade under his jaw, being careful around the raised scar there. He was impatient to be done with this. “Is anyone going to care?”

There was a grunt from the bedroom, and Kaidan sounded breathless when he replied, “I don’t… I don’t think so?”

“We’re in dress blues, I think we’ll be fine.” Shepard rinsed and replaced the razor, splashed some water on his face to clear the extra soap away. He frowned when he saw how many patches he had missed, particularly around his scars where he tended to be too ginger to actually tilt the blade the right way. This is why he never went clean-shaven. Sometimes Kaidan would offer to fix it, and for some reason, Kaidan was somehow always more gentle and more assured with the razor than Shepard ever was.

“Well there’s the mission afterwards… the field exercise?”

“…oh no.” Shepard followed the steam billowing out into the bedroom and found Kaidan on a mat on the floor, eyebrows scrunched in concentration as he sank into a lunge on his bad leg. He was still dressed in underwear and a black a-shirt. There was definitely a little more vigor in his morning stretches today. His hair was still mussed from rolling out of bed directly into his up-keep routine, but the bed had already been made.

And Shepard had been pretty sure it was his turn to make the bed…

“Yeah,” Kaidan grunted, hardly looking up, “we’re going planet-side behind the recruits, remember? It’s how we make our evaluations?”

“…dammit. I forgot all about that.”

Kaidan laughed as he plopped down onto the floor, “Baby, it’s the whole reason we’re going to begin with!” He brushed a graying forelock off his forehead and gave a teasing tug at Shepard’s towel as he came around to sit on the edge of the bed above Kaidan.

“I thought we’d go in dress blues for the ceremony, watch the recruits on vid screens: make our recommendations like that.”

“Nah,” Kaidan eased himself onto his back. “They wanna make a show out of the First Two Human Spectres, of course.”

“There’s no way I can keep up with 30 year olds.” Shepard smiled dourly, watched Kaidan pull one leg into the air.

“Why do you think I’m stretching?” Kaidan replied with a rusty chuckle. His breath caught as he straightened one leg. “It’ll be okay: we don’t have to do the course at speed, you’re still the best shot out there, and I’ll wow ‘em with the ol’ biotics.”

Shepard frowned at that, “You’re gonna kill your head if you do that.”

“I’ll take it easy,” Kaidan said softly. “It’s a special occasion: the anniversary, Spectre selection. So what if I’m out for a few days after? These kids deserve it.” Kaidan hoisted one leg over the other and pulled the uncrossed leg up into the air. “God, ‘kids.’ Listen to me!” He grit his teeth, eased into the hamstring stretch. It made Shepard’s bad hip throb just watching it. Shepard knew, though, that it was hurting his husband’s shoulders more than anything to hold his leg back. And these days, overloading his biotics would lay him up for a week with headaches.

“…okay.” Shepard stood and gently took Kaidan’s leg, easing it back. Kaidan sighed appreciatively, let his shoulders ease back and his eyes close while Shepard deepened the stretch. Kaidan had mentioned the field trials would be slow and steady, but he was definitely stretching for speed. He was always preparing for the unlikely.

Shepard hadn’t seen him working on these kinds of stretches since the war. He used to come down to the shuttle bay to find Kaidan dressed in his thermal layer, counting to himself as he contorted his body every which way in sprinter stretches. Before his promotion to major, Kaidan had added a lot of muscle-mass, and he privately admitted to Shepard once that it always made him feel a little slower than he used to—that and the heavy armor, of course.

He probably hadn’t been fishing for compliments, but Shepard had taken the opportunity to anyway: smirking and peeling off Kaidan’s shirt to ‘get a look at all that big slow muscle.’ But really, all the way back on the SR-1, Shepard had helped Kaidan with this particular stretch before each mission. There’d been a kind of intimacy to it, the trust involved. Years before they had ever actually admitted their feelings for each other, just the bond of two friends. After Kaidan’s private admission of feeling ‘slow,’ the bond Shepard felt every time they stretched was even stronger.

“Make sure to keep you core tight,” Shepard coached with a soft voice, clearing his throat.

It was odd to consider, a small thing: before the war had destroyed both men’s bodies, before they had been lovers, before they had grown old together, Shepard had always helped with this particular stretch.

Kaidan breathed out a count of ‘thirty’ and they switched legs to repeat the process.

“You gonna do a little stretching to work that hip out?” Kaidan huffed when Shepard finally let his leg drop.

“I probably should,” Shepard sighed. Kaidan smirked up at him and tugged at his towel again, almost slipping it off. “But I already showered. I wish I’d remembered. I’m going to get sweaty again.” Shepard eased down onto his knees when Kaidan held his arms wide, settled down next to Kaidan’s body.

“Well,” Kaidan pulled him in for a kiss, “you can just hop in with me, how about?”

“Mm, alright.”

Shepard kissed him again, then wriggled out of his husband’s arms as his hip started to throb against the hard floor. They traded positions with Shepard on his back and Kaidan kneeling beside.

“Think I should put on some clothes first, Admiral?” Shepard quirked an eyebrow, “Or would you prefer me like this?”

“Well, Commander,” Kaidan rubbed his hand up Shepard’s body, “I don’t think there’s any need to get any more clothes dirty, do you?”

“No sir!” Shepard laughed. Kaidan kept a hand on his thigh and his bad hip to keep them stable as Shepard began what ground stretches he could manage these days. When he finished, Kaidan helped him to his feet, then idly fiddled with his own wedding ring.

“…what did we decide about the rings, Baby?”

“Well I can’t really get mine off, so…”

Kaidan tugged at his, but—like Shepard’s—it wouldn’t even twist around his finger. “Damn, me neither.”

“Do we really care about uniform code?” Shepard said, slipping the towel off from around his waist to wipe the sweat from his face. Kaidan smirked and slipped an arm around his hips.

“You’re a legend: you don’t wanna look sloppy in front of a couple Spectre hopefuls, do you?”

“ _We_ are legends.” Shepard tossed the towel on the bed and put his hands on his husband’s shoulders, massaging the tension out of the scar tissue beneath the skin. “And I think that gives us a little lee-way.”

“Hmm.” Kaidan hummed under Shepard’s touch, kissed him on the cheek. “Hrm. You taste like soap. Missed a couple spots too, want me to get ‘em?

“If we’ve got the time.” Shepard sighed.

“Aww,” Kaidan winked, “we’ve got plenty of time.” With that he eased back and took Shepard’s hands in his own, softly kissing each palm. He ran a thumb over Shepard’s wedding band. “…you sure your gauntlets’ll fit over this ring?” He asked slyly.

Shepard let out a groan, “I didn’t even think about that. You’re probably right.”

“Here…” Kaidan took his hand more firmly, tugged at the ring with three fingers. He still had agile hands all these years later. Shepard’s had always been nobbled, more so since the war. It had never bothered Kaidan: he had never said a word about it, even now as he pulled and tugged and twisted at the band stuck below his second knuckle. Shepard tried not to wince.

“Damn!” Kaidan exclaimed at last, kissing the ring and Shepard’s swollen knuckle. “Maybe we try with some soap in the shower? Maybe a little cooking oil…” Kaidan muttered.

“I’ll give it a try. You shower first though,” Shepard said, reaching for his discarded towel on the bed. He jumped when Kaidan pinched his butt.

“Oh no. You already agreed to shower _with_ me, remember?” Kaidan’s voice rasped in Shepard’s ear as his arms came around his husband’s naked waist from behind.

“Don’t know how it slipped my mind.” Shepard couldn’t quite crane his neck around to meet Kaidan’s lips, so he kissed the air instead and received the kiss returned against his pulse.

“Besides,” Kaidan sighed, fingers trailing off Shepard’s belly and pulling him around to the bathroom, “I need you to help me with my hair.”

A few minutes later, Shepard reflected exactly how much like old times this was: Kaidan in a chair in the bathroom, box of black hair coloring sitting on the table. Kaidan took every opportunity to compliment Shepard on how his hair had turned a uniform silver—practically all at once. He kept it buzzed for years after the war; but as soon as he grew it out the first time, it was a dazzling white.

Kaidan’s had faded over the years, and carding his fingers through his husband’s hair in front of the mirror, Shepard found it fascinating. It was almost entirely gray now, but all kinds, like raw iron. A deep and dirty gray on top of his head—still inexplicably styled even though Kaidan had only been awake for an hour—and white along the temples, even as it had been when he was younger.

It had taken a few months into their relationship—still tip-toeing around the crew—for Shepard to get up the courage to ask about the gray in Kaidan’s hair. Kaidan had been embarrassed to admit that he’d started going gray in his late twenties.

“You worry so much, I’m hardly surprised!” Shepard had said then. Seeing his face in the mirror now, Shepard was unable to tell where the ‘care-lines’ ended and the ‘laugh-lines’ began, and he was convinced his assessment that night had been wrong.

Kaidan had been coloring the gray out of his hair since before Shepard had met him, but with his assignment to Biotics Division after his promotion to major, he’d stopped. The way Shepard would kiss his temples, stroke the flecks of white in his hair had made him forego dying it back to black after the war… for a while. Still, he had always left the gray around the temples, and settled on a distinguished salt and pepper look.

Some days, Kaidan’s shoulder ached so bad he couldn’t life his arms high enough to actually add the color himself, especially after a work-out. Shepard had been helping him wash his hair in the shower for a long time, but the first time Kaidan had sighed and softly ask Shepard to help him color his hair, Shepard had smiled.

Truthfully, he preferred the gray. He thought the different shades of iron made Kaidan look so handsome, and for a long time he had tried to convince Kaidan of that every time he bought a box of hair color.

But when Kaidan asked for his help, Shepard hadn’t said a word.

“Must be a special day, huh?” Shepard asked, picking up the box of color from the sink. Kaidan sighed with a little smirk.

“Yeah. Been a long time. Figured I should look… my best… for the cameras at the ceremony.” Kaidan closed his eyes and leaned back into the chair and Shepard’s touch. That made Shepard grin, but now, as then, he didn’t say a word.

“It’s been so long. I hope I remember how to do this…” he teased, removing the tube of black cream and applying it with practiced hands. Of course he remembered. His memory might have gone in a lot of ways, but this was Kaidan. It was important to _him_. He couldn’t forget something like this.

Over the years, Kaidan had trusted Shepard more and more to decide exactly how much gray needed covering. And over the years, Shepard had colored less and less. And so this time, working the color down to the roots, he added just a dash of black back into Kaidan’s hair.

“How’s that?” Shepard asked when he finished, and Kaidan opened his eyes.

“Looks just right,” Kaidan said, like he always did.

“And I saved half the tube,” Shepard chuckled, turning to turn on the shower, “for next time.”

“Yeah,” Kaidan huffed, stripping out of his clothes, “ _next_ time.”

They kissed under the water, and then Kaidan turned to let Shepard massage his scalp in the spray to lock in the color. Shepard wasn’t naïve: often enough an invitation to shower meant Kaidan hurt too much to wash his own hair. Kaidan always felt a little guilty, tried to pay him back with kisses and touches under the hot water like when they did years ago together in Captain Anderson’ apartment on the Citadel. But Shepard always shrugged away from _those_ touched: nothing needed to be repaid.

This morning though, Kaidan would not take no for an answer. He pulled Shepard in and pressed him against the tile with a deep kiss. He was overly nostalgic today, for sure, but the act made Shepard feel like a younger man. When he commanded the Normandy against the Reapers, Kaidan had kissed him in the shower like this.

Except then, it had been an exhausted, desperate kiss. They’d both been filthy—just back from a mission gone awry. They were sweaty, tired, covered in their own dried blood, and eager to shower and get some sleep.

And it was the first time Kaidan had ever agreed to shower in Shepard’s cabin, pulled along listlessly by Shepard’s dogged insistence. As they’d stood together beneath the spray, washing their bodies in a haze of fatigue—kissing because it was easier than trying to verbalize their relief in each other’s safety—Shepard had known that Kaidan was exactly who he wanted to be with at the end of every day.

 Shortly after, Kaidan had moved into his cabin, and nobody said a word. They hadn’t planned it, and in that moment they hadn’t known what the future would bring, didn’t expect they’d live through the war. They had just held each other in the dimness of the private bathroom and felt like old men in each other’s arms.

“Here, let’s see…” Shepard pulled Kaidan’s hands up from around his waist and attempted to twist his husband’s ring, squirting some of the body wash and liberally applying it to Kaidan’s hand. Kaidan’s hands were still smooth after all these years, and Shepard always marveled. Even this long out of active combat, Shepard’s hands were still calloused as ever. Kaidan’s hands though seemed to go from battle-hardened to soft from sundown to sun up.

“Almost, Babe… ack.”

“Sorry, Kay.” Shepard had wrenched Kaidan’s finger at an awkward angle, but the ring would now slip up to the knuckle before getting stuck, at least.

“Geez… I haven’t taken this thing off in…” Kaidan rubbed up the white scar that ran from Shepard’s pelvis to his sternum, “Over a decade, I suppose?”

“Almost got it… almost….” His fingers slipped off the ring, and Shepard harrumphed. Kaidan laughed when he thudded his head against his shoulder and squeezed him tight around the middle, kissing his wet hair.

“Giving up already?” He asked wryly.

“Just conserving my energy and waiting for my XO to come up with a brilliant plan,” he replied with a sly grin while Kaidan ran his fingers over his chest. Shepard took the opportunity to explore his husband’s body.

Kaidan kept in good shape. Age had dulled his muscle tone, civilian life (or as close to it as the two Spectres had ever come) had added a few pounds. But he wore the weight and the muscle with equal pride: each one hard earned, each one… carefully managed.

Shepard’s body hadn’t aged much at all, except for the discolorations between skin grafts and scar tissue. The various bone weaves, skin weaves, muscle-hardening weaves… held Shepard’s body at a permanent 29 even while the skin aged around it. He would stretch and do his exercises to keep up his stamina, but his shape kept itself. He knew it made Kaidan at least slightly envious.

“It’s all machines, Kay,” Shepard said for the thousandth time when Kaidan hummed greedily at the taut ‘V’ of his waist, “I’m a cyborg.”

“What was that? I wasn’t paying attention because I was busy staring at my husband’s hot body.” Kaidan was grinning, and Shepard laughed. There had been plenty of times where Shepard had _not_ been able to laugh about that: feeling less than human even in Kaidan’s arms—the only place he had ever really felt like a real person to begin with. That had been awful.

That was all in the past.

Out of the shower, they dried each other off and Kaidan padded down to the kitchen in his underwear and an undershirt mumbling about cooking oil. Shepard had another idea, and slipped into the closet. The weapon bench they still kept in the closet was still neatly littered with a stripped Eviscerator, fully cleaned and modded to the nines. He had meant to take it on this mission, but it had slipped his mind. He didn’t care at present, his mind fully occupied with his stuck wedding band. He rifled through the tool kit on the side of the bench and retrieved a small bottle with a fine applicator tip.

“Baby?” Kaidan called from the steps.

“In here.”

Kaidan walked into the closet holding a bottle of oil, “Let’s try this—is that, gun lubricant?”

“Mhm.”

Kaidan shrugged, bent over the workbench to watch Shepard work the lube beneath his ring.

“Y’know, if that doesn’t work…” Kaidan smirked, “there’s always other lube we can try.” Shepard cast him a wary smile but soon they were both sputtering out a laugh. All of a sudden, Shepard’s wedding band twisted counter-clockwise and both men crowed excitedly.

“Here, here!” Kaidan took Shepard’s hand again, twisting the ring carefully back and forth and finally pulling it over the knuckle and off Shepard’s finger. “Yes! _Yes!_ Okay, now do me!”

Shepard rushed to comply, and both men were laughing again. It was a funny thing to get excited over, but Shepard couldn’t help but grin as Kaidan leaned over to kiss Shepard’s cheek when he worked the band off Kaidan’s hand. He set the rings together next to the barrel of the stripped shot-gun and wiped his hands off on his towel, reaching up to clean Kaidan’s hands as well.

“Well…” Kaidan said looking down at the pale band around his ring finger, “Been a long time since that skin’s seen the light of day.”

“It feels weird,” Shepard frowned. “I don’t like it.”

“Yeah, well.” He drew Shepard to him again, “Don’t get used to it, eh?”

Kaidan fished out their dog tags and handed Shepard his: one of Kaidan’s tags, and one of his own.

“Hmm,” Shepard frowned when he picked the rings up off the bench. They were each alike, and while Shepard’s was _slightly_ larger than Kaidan’s, there was no way to tell by looking.  “…I should’ve been more careful. I don’t know whose is whose. I guess we can try them on and see?”

“No!” Kaidan chortled, plucking one at random, “We’ll never get ‘em off again. I’ll take this one, you take that one, we’ll sort it out when this thing’s over. Deal?” He gave Shepard a warm smile and he nodded, threading the chain of his dog-tags through the silver band.

In another, they were in dress blues, Kaidan’s just tight enough to show off that he was still impressively in-shape, and Shepard’s epaulettes sharing off the bow in his shoulders since his reconstructive surgery. Kaidan fixed the collar of Shepard’s uniform while Shepard smoother a few wrinkles out of Kaidan’s.

“Well, that’s step one. Guess I’ll find out if my armor still fits once we board the Normandy…”

Kaidan didn’t respond, but merely gave Shepard a soft smile, the little lines around his eyes coming into deep relief. He looked at Shepard like this sometimes, and more and more as the years went by. He would just stare for a moment. At first, it had made him feel uncomfortable—for the first few years, in fact.

It would have been easy to remember Kaidan as the zealous young man he had met on the Normandy all those years ago, making good strong eye-contact with his commanding officer, but turning away whenever he was asked a personal question. Shepard used to make a game of it in his mind: trying to catch his lieutenant’s eye in a conversation.

But during the Reaper war, it was as if Kaidan had made _looking_ at Shepard a priority. After the war, in his hospital bed, Miranda told him that Kaidan would often just look at it him for hours on end when Shepard was put into a coma for surgery. It was safe to say Kaidan had seen more of Shepard than Shepard had of him. It made Shepard feel guilty in a way he couldn’t explain—and self-conscious.

But lately—ten years, really—that look, that long stare and those soft eyes with their wreath of wrinkles, could stand in for a kiss. That stare could stand in for a conversation. It could stand in for years of lost time. It could white-out any misunderstanding.

Kaidan placed his hand over Shepard’s heart, where the wedding band hung from his dog-tags.

“Guess we’re old soldiers, huh?”

This time it was true.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeeeeeeeah. Fluff!! Thanks for reading, despite the short length and saccharine nature of these two old love-birds! You guys are seriously the best people.


End file.
